Growing Pains
Rapid growth can cause major challenges for an organization. As you grow and scale, it is easy to lose quality, culture and your entrepreneurial mindset. If you do not address the issues early, they can counteract the hard work you and your sales and marketing teams have done to build the business in the first place.
Grow or Die
The world is changing at a rapid pace and that means organizations that are not growing are dying. If you want to be the best, you must grow faster than your competition. However, growth does not simply refer to size. You could actually shrink the size of your organization but still grow. This could be accomplished by creating innovative products or services, evolving your processes or narrowing your focus to better serve a niche. In short, finding ways to evolve and grow will lead to a stronger customer base but stagnating will lead to the eventual death of your organization.
Successful Scaling
Successful scaling for a high-performance organization means being able to maintain and improve your culture and quality as you grow. You want to build processes that will help you reach continually higher levels of performance. If you begin with a strong structure and effective, scalable processes, scaling becomes relatively easy. But, if you start with structure and processes that are ineffective, inefficient and not repeatable, you will have massive difficulties with scaling. To put it another way, if you scale gold, you get a lot of gold. If you scale shit, you get a big pile of shit. (Pardon the French).
At Organizational Engineering, we use a concept called a Bubble of Awesome(TM) to help you create gold to scale. Our Organizational Engineers will guide you through the process of building a strong structure and processes for about 10 to 20 people. We help you iterate on the Bubble of Awesome(TM) until it is running at a level worthy of the term high-performance. If you are a small organization this is the foundation on which you can bring in additional people or teams. For larger organizations, you slowly allow people to join the Bubble in order to preserve the new culture you have built. This process results in rapid improvements in quality and productivity and is an extremely fast and efficient method for scaling organizations.